Recruiting Forum Football Talk II

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My biggest question is that are the uptick in positive cases actually sick, or are they people being tested because they have been in contact with a sick positive or just want to know if they are carrying or have had the virus? There is so little info out there that I know of telling us about what percentage of all of these positives are actually sick.
It’s hard to believe anything being reported with all the misinformation the last few months. Reports of false positives, duplicated reporting, inconsistent test results, etc.... The virus is real but the severity and hysteria are a sham IMO.
 
Arizona just reinstituted closings of bars and limitations of gatherings over 50. I know of some churches in Tennessee who have seen an uptick in confirmed cases. This is the first time I have been actually concerned you may not see college or professional football. A sport can’t override a state limitation on gatherings (as far as I know...I could be wrong). Just seems like everything is trending the wrong direction
This **** will never end...ever.
 
Deaths are a lagging indicator and about the only way to tell how serious these cases are. Is "not sick" a asymptomatic or is it just a high fever with no permanent damage?

You would expect deaths to start ticking up significantly this week and next given how fast Arizona and Florida have been catching positive cases. Of course, that's assuming the people getting sick aren't younger than average, which would help, and that hospitals don't have to start rationing care, which would not. We will see, as a resident of Arizona, I am very disappointed the summer heat hasn't seemed to help us at all.
Yeah but it's a dry heat so....
 
Again false. The ratio to new infections to hospitalizations is very low.

The real number of hospitalizations in Tennessee is increasing, which confirms that at least some of the new cases are real, which was the entirety of my point. I didn't say anything about ratios of cases to hospitalizations, although I would expect that to be improved for reasons I have stated ad nauseum.
 
Jennings and Calloway were huge losses but they're not accounting for what we all witnessed: the emergence of Eric Gray. Gray combined with Chandler and a very stout oline is going to not only make the running game a threat he's going to open up the passing game in a way we haven't seen since Dobbs was here. That changes everything about our offense and gives it a far greater potential than it has had since Kamara/Dobbs etc. were here. Also, Josh Palmer is a legit WR threat. He was the best pure WR on the roster last season and finished 2nd overall behind JJ. He is very much undervalued and overlooked by analysts that only had JJ and Calloway on the radar but he had a very good junior campaign and is set to have an even better senior year if the trajectory he's been on holds. What we need are two more WRs to step up and join him. I think we're ok but not great at TE which is about where we were last year. TBH, tho it's hard to count offense as losing much production given that we quite simply had an unproductive offense and a lot of that was due to lacking a consistent threat in the running game.

And yes, our defense is being criminally undervalued. That said, I still don't see where FPI is coming from. How is South Carolina better on paper?

ESPN brought Bill Connelly and his S&P+ analysis approach into their tent last year. When they first issued the preseason FPI for this year they had us at #19 and Kentucky at #33 and South Carolina at #34.

Preseason college football FPI breakdown

Then they huddled up and came up with a new updated approach to producing their FPI:

As we mentioned at the top, we made some improvements to the way FPI works in the preseason. While the changes are minor for most teams, for a few they are significant. Louisville is one of those teams and a good example to illustrate what these changes look like.

Last season, the Cardinals started the season with Jawon Pass at quarterback. He played a couple of games before suffering a season-ending injury. Micale Cunningham took over and played most of the rest of the season, but Evan Conley worked in some time as well. But with Cunningham, Louisville was at its best, and he's the presumed starter heading into 2020. Our old FPI would not know the difference between the 2019 offense under each of the three quarterbacks, but the new version does. And so it's more optimistic about the Louisville offense because it's thinking it likely will be the one with Cunningham at the helm, rather than a mix of the three.

And by the way, FPI is awfully high on Louisville's offense, pegging it as fourth best in the country. That's a bright spot for an ACC that is expected to be dominated by Clemson.
Speaking of ACC teams affected by these changes, Miami is another. Our old model treated all transfer quarterbacks the same. But D'Eriq King is not a generic transfer. The updated version knows that. The only problem is that FPI isn't thrilled about the rest of the Hurricanes, so it still thinks Miami is only the 51st-best FBS team.

In addition to those quarterback-specific improvements, we made changes to the way we quantify experience. In the old version or our model, we simply counted the number of returning starters on offense and defense and denoted whether the starting QB returned or whether a transfer came in. Now we have added more position-specific measures to quantify the amount of experience returning at each position (for example, target share for wide receivers).

Breaking down the updated 2020 FPI college football rankings

I'm excited about Eric Gray too. The thing is though that he rushed 101 times last year but 25 of those times were against the #115 nationally ranked run defense of Vanderbilt. That performance generated a lot of buzz but the other 76 rushes he had on the season netted around 3.86 yards per attempt.

So the new version of FPI is sort of trying to measure quality of performance. In the old version we got credit for having a returning quarterback. In the new version the FPI assumes that quarterback is likely Guarantano and based of his historical performance that's not likely to be considered that much of a positive, until he demonstrates otherwise. So essentially FPI now apparently goes into the weeds and looks at the individual players and their historical performance or based on new incoming talent, expected performance, instead of just looking at the position in a generic sense.

On this almost everyone seems to agree, we should have one of the best offensive lines not just in the conference but in the entire country. Many folks rightly believe that will help both our running game and our passing game, assuming we can field a sufficient number of SEC caliber receivers.

If we are 4-0 after the Florida game and look like a decent football team, perceptions, including FPI, of our quality as a football team will vastly improve. jmo.

Nitpick: We lost Callaway but gained Calloway.
 
The real number of hospitalizations in Tennessee is increasing, which confirms that at least some of the new cases are real, which was the entirety of my point. I didn't say anything about ratios of cases to hospitalizations, although I would expect that to be improved for reasons I have stated ad nauseum.

This banter about hospital capacity needs to stop. Not necessarily directed at you, SS. Just in general. It’s killing people that need to come for treatment.

From a hospital rep out of Houston yesterday:

“What you’ve been hearing is a report that we are at 97% or so capacity...Exactly one year ago, it was at 95%. It is completely normal for us to have ICU capacities that run in the 80s - 90s. That’s how all of us operate hospitals.

The capacity that’s being reported is base capacity … we have the ability to go far higher than that in terms of the ICU beds....We are seeing younger patients, we are seeing a shorter length of stay, we are seeing lower immortality, and we are seeing lower ICU utilization."

People need to come to the hospital or emergency department to receive care and not allow bad things to happen to them because they are somehow inaccurately afraid of coming to the hospitals. That’s a very key message.

The reality is our capacity to care for those patients significantly exceeds what we’re staffing on any given day...As you look at the capacity of the hospitals on a day-to-day basis, it can be a little misleading.

Our goal has been for the hospital operators, the people who actually manage bed capacity, to be clear that we’re not in imminent danger of running out of bed capacity here in Houston to care of COVID patients, or those who have other illnesses that require hospital care.“
 
This banter about hospital capacity needs to stop. Not necessarily directed at you, SS. Just in general. It’s killing people that need to come for treatment.

From a hospital rep out of Houston yesterday:

Man...I'm just gonna shut up. Didn't say anything about capacity. Capacity in Tennessee is fine. Just expressing an objective data point as a proof that some percentage of increased cases are real. Nothing more.
 
I don’t understand the FPI prediction. Why so low and what is with the incredibly low chance against Oklahoma? I don’t expect a win but 12 percent is absurd. So is theirs and everyone else’s predictions that Florida will be an easier game than UGA or OU.
OU is #11 in their preseason ranking last I saw. Plus a road game. Almost a thousand miles to travel (-1 epa). They have also recruited very well recently. Better than they did leading up to our 14/15 matchups, for comparison. All to say, I think that prediction is fairly in line with their UF, UGA, Bama ones.

But I wonder if/when they will discount road games (to a degree). No fans has to take away a good bit of the home field advantage. There's still an advantage to being in a comfortable, familiar stadium and field, plus not having travel lag. But no fans should be a 50%+ discount on home field advantage jmo.
 
I guess some think 11 TD and 5 INT's for a freshman QB is awesome. I don't see it.
I thought he was decent. Offensive system was poor. Luke Doty is another stud coming in for them. All said, a couple of young QBs + new OC + pandemic = lol.

So glad to have 2nd year Chaney and 5th year anybody at QB, plus a run game/monster OL to lean on. Experience and familiarity will win out this year. Young stud QBs and fancy complicated pass games will take a backseat for just one year.
 
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